Blog Comments & Posts

Great graphic and post Aleyda! I would add SpyFu to the list of competitive keyword tools. It takes a bit of filtering but I find that it is a powerful way of uncovering paid and organic search keywords. This also shows keyword areas of specific importance to the competitor where they are bidding on paid and focusing on organic.

A great post. I think you are headed in the right direction with this but I come at this from a branch of what you are saying.

My view is that Bing is using Google as an authoritative ranking signal within its ranking algorithm. In other words, using the click data that it gathers via its toolbar, Bing assesses those searches that are done on Google and the resulting ranking results for those searches. Bing thing incorporates that authoritative signal into how it organizes their own SERP. As you accurately pointed out Bing did not have any other data to throw in the mix for these VERY specific and likely unrepeatable queries thus it had to rely on the "Authoritative" Google ranking criteria for returning listings for that query. I believe that Bing IS using all click data for all queries on Google as an influence within its algorithm.

"Is this wrong," has been the question everyone has been asking or trying to answer but I don't think that is necessarily the right discussion. I think the discussion should point to how Google has surpassed being just a competitor, to being a reference source for not only Bing but for thousands of other tools and millions (billions?) of users daily throughout the world. Why wouldn't Bing consider this a credible source of evaluation for a site to rank for a specific query? I cannot see the same happening for every search engine available out there to be used like you mention in your article. There would be too much spam for this queries (isolated though they are) to just create a link for every page found in this manner. So I would propose that Google is one of possibly only a hand-full that Bing applies this algorithm authority to.

To summarize, I do not discount what Google was seeing but I do believe that the context is not that it was copied but that it was the only reference source available for a VERY specific query and that Google's rankings on their SERP is being used as an authoritative factor to rank sites for user queries.

Interesting research but confused about the changes you made between each month as to the Title Tag. What changes were made from month to month. And what time frame was this done, i.e. before or after may-day update or instant update. Thanks for the clarification.